Everyone is talking about the cloud lately, and this week brings news of a partnership designed to help ISVs quickly deploy and accelerate new hosted software products.

Akamai Technologies is teaming up with OpSource, which provides managed hosting services to software makers that want to outsource their Web infrastructure and application management. The joint agreement adds Akamai’s tools for optimizing application delivery to the mix, so that OpSource customers can accelerate their cloud-based applications.

Using OpSource’s Web application delivery and management services with Akamai’s acceleration capabilities frees ISVs to focus their resources on developing, marketing and selling their applications, says Andy Rubinson, senior product marketing manager for application acceleration at Akamai.

“By using our joint solutions, SaaS ISVs can focus on what they do best, which is developing software,” Rubinson says. “They don’t have to worry about their infrastructure, and they don’t have to worry about how their offering is being delivered in the cloud.”

With the new partnership. SaaS ISVs that are using OpSource can now incorporate Akamai's acceleration capabilities early in the application or software development cycle, so they can design their hosted applications from the start to take advantage of Akamai's distributed platform for optimizing Web-based application delivery, adds Richard Dym, chief marketing officer at OpSource.

“From a technical perspective, the ability to talk jointly to a customer, at an earlier stage, about application acceleration is important,” Dym says.

In addition to its partnership news, Akamai also unveiled enhancements to its Web Application Accelerator service. For instance, new access control functionality is designed to help end users access an ISV's offerings from secure enterprise locations, Rubinson says.

In addition, improved visibility into customer traffic can help ISVs better understand customer adoption and behavior patterns. “We can help our SaaS customers understand who is coming to their site, what end user adoption looks like, and where traffic is coming from, for example,” Rubinson says. “As time goes on, we plan to continue to build on those capabilities for our SaaS customers.”

Ann Bednarz is associate news editor at Network World.